Hello TPM readers! Thanks for stopping by this discussion of my new book, U.S. vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security. Let me tell you a little bit about why I wrote U.S. vs. Them--the questions that led me to start the book and the answer I ultimately found--and then we'll throw open the doors to your comments, as well as to posts by the fantastically smart and knowledgeable group of foreign policy experts that have agreed to participate in this Book Club.

U.S. vs. Them is the product of my chief post-9/11 fear and of my confusion about the Bush administration's response to the attacks. After September 11, I made an assumption: I assumed that the president and his advisers understood that their top priority had to be preventing a nuclear 9/11. The United States had survived al Qaeda's attack, but it had changed us. We had lost thousands of lives and billions of dollars; and our politics, our national psychology, and our foreign policy had all suffered. I wondered what would happen after an attack that was 100 or 1,000 times worse. The United States would survive, but would it survive in anything resembling its present form? I didn't think so, and my apprehension was reinforced by further research. For example, I was startled to find these emotional lines in the middle of one government report on homeland security:

The personal loss of loved ones would be immeasurable. The health consequences to the population directly impacted would be severe. The physical damage to the community would be extreme. The costs of the decontamination and rebuilding would be staggering. But these losses do not begin to address the true implications of this type of an incident[.] The detonation of an IND [improvised nuclear device] in a U.S. city would forever change the American psyche, as well as its politics and worldview.

My confusion stemmed from the fact that, while President Bush claimed to agree that a nuclear terrorist attack was the most serious threat facing America (see, for example, his remarks during his first debate with John Kerry in 2004), his behavior suggested otherwise. He seemed uninterested in funding programs to secure "loose" fissile material in Russia; he acquiesced in Pakistan's refusal to let American intelligence or the International Atomic Energy Agency question A.Q. Khan, the notorious proliferator; and he struck up a deal to supply India with civilian nuclear technology that would also aid its atomic weapons program and likely spur a response from Pakistan. The Bush administration was clearly driven by something other than a desire to avert existential catastrophe.

The most mysterious data point was the Iraq war. It's rarely mentioned anymore, but in March 2003, before we invaded, we knew that both North Korea and Iran presented more immediate nuclear threats--even if we assumed that our worst-case estimate of Saddam's capabilities was correct. In late 2002 and early 2003, North Korea had withdrawn from a Clinton-era agreement capping its production of plutonium, it had expelled IAEA inspectors, it had pulled out of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and it was preparing to reprocess spent nuclear fuel that would allow it to make atomic bombs. And in February 2003, a team of IAEA inspectors visited Iran and found a pilot cascade of 160 centrifuges for enriching uranium that could be used to make nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei had reported, "After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq."

Foreign policy commentators explained that the Bush administration invaded Iraq using cherry-picked intelligence over the objections of allies who would have preferred to extend United Nations inspections because it was unilateralist, militarist, and deceitful. But, as I write in the book's introduction (which you can read in full on my website), I found that analysis more descriptive than explanatory. It didn't answer why the administration was unilateralist and militarist and deceitful in the first place. It didn't explain why Iraq became the top priority after Afghanistan. Nor did it answer why the administration seemed content to essentially ignore the nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran--why it acted so assertively toward Iraq, but then outsourced North Korea policy to the Chinese and Iran policy to the UN Security Council. What I had was a mystery not only about how the administration prioritized U.S. foreign policy objectives, but how it selected what means it would use to reach those ends.

The prevailing ideological explanation for the Bush administration's behavior has long been that it was run by neoconservatives, descendants of a group of erstwhile liberals who had defected from the Democratic Party during the 1970s because of what they saw as its increasing pacifism toward the communist threat. Among other things, post-Cold War neocons had embraced democratization as a plank of U.S. foreign policy. But I didn't think this could be the whole story. After all, while there were certainly neocons in the administration, there were many influential Bush aides, like John Bolton, who had little connection to neoconservatism.

So I dug a bit deeper, and what I found was that the Bush administration's foreign policy bore a striking resemblance to the conservatism that developed after World War II under the tutelage of William F. Buckley, Jr. and the magazine he founded, National Review. Buckley and colleagues like James Burnham advanced a view of the Cold War not as a struggle between superpowers but rather as an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil--a literal Manichaeism that had important ramifications for national security policy. It led them to oppose coexistence with, containment of, and diplomacy toward the Soviet Union; to reject mutually assured destruction (essentially a nuclear coexistence arrived at through negotiations); to dismiss international institutions as distracting; and even to dispute the value of empiricism. These ideas had dangerous consequences. For example, Barry Goldwater criticized President Kennedy for peacefully ending the Cuban missile crisis because it required compromise with the Soviets, National Review opposed the (now universally lauded) nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a sop to the U.S.S.R., and Reagan officials argued that a nuclear war was winnable.

The conservative division of the world into good and evil will be familiar to anyone who's listened to the president speak about the war on terrorism, but what's really fascinating is how the ramifications of Cold War conservatism presaged the Bush administration's foreign policy. Throughout the Cold War, conservatives elevated the importance of regime change above that of nuclear stability, and so Bush's focus on Iraq over Iran and North Korea can be understood as a function of a good-versus-evil worldview which held that the elimination of a nasty regime was more important than the elimination of a nuclear threat. It's not that Iraq was more evil per se, but that it was possible to eliminate it militarily, whereas Iran and North Korea were far more difficult to invade. Moreover, Cold War conservatism helps explain why, without a military solution, the administration was lost when it came to dealing with Tehran and Pyongyang: the administration believed--indeed conservatives had believed for half a century--that you could not negotiate, contain, or even coexist with evil. In fact, Iraq was an example of the moral mushiness of containment--to the disgust of conservatives, Saddam had for years been poking holes in the box we'd built around him after the Gulf War. By contrast, negotiation with North Korea or Iran would have required coexistence with those regimes and sacrificed the possibility of eventual regime change in favor of containment.

It'll take more space--a book's worth, actually--to fully explain how a simple, binary worldview has had such dramatic and widespread effects. But conservatism explains a lot not only about Bush's nonproliferation policies, but also about the administration's fascination with missile defense, its pursuit of new types of nuclear weapons, and its apparent adoption of a more aggressive nuclear doctrine. But let me leave it here for now, listen to what you're interested in focusing on, and hear from our other Book Club participants. Thanks for coming--I think it's going to be an exciting conversation, and I hope you'll check out U.S. vs. Them.